Williams-Sonoma – from Excel Pivot Tables to visual cloud BI
- Summary:
- Williams-Sonoma has rolled out NetSuite to its international stores and is now using Tableau to visualise its data and improve reporting.
Last year diginomica outlined how multi-billion dollar retailer Williams-Sonoma has used NetSuite to expand its presence into new global territories, by implementing a two-tier ERP strategy. Domestically in the US the company has invested millions in a highly customised on-premise solution, mixing together a number of technologies from the likes of SAP and Oracle, but for its international rollout it went with NetSuite's cloud solution.
At this year's annual NetSuite customer event in San Jose, it was interesting to hear how Williams-Sonoma had since progressed the project and is now integrating other tools to improve its analytics and BI. Director of retail reporting at Williams-Sonoma, Geoff Gurney, explained how the global businesses had become accustomed to using Excel and essentially suffered from the age old problem of every division thinking that their way of reporting was 'the right way'.
Gurney said that he wanted to get all of the global divisions analysing and reporting in the same method, using the same tools, streamlining the process, and ultimately giving everybody a single version of the truth. He explained that this was particularly important for stores and teams outside of the US, because they are smaller outlets, but have the same expectations placed upon them as the large domestic teams. Gurney explained:
The data is very complicated, it's doing a lot. Just the nature of being a global business, using the different purchase orders etc, and flipping all of that. The data becomes even more complicated than just a US retailer.
There was a challenge, transparency in the business was a little bit tough. It was tough for a variety of reasons. NetSuite isn't a BI tool, they say that all the time. The data was a little difficult, so there were hundreds and hundreds of reports that users were using in offices across the world. We had merchandise planners in Singapore, we have merchandise planners in Brooklyn, there are buyers in San Francisco, we have store teams in UK and Australia, there are all of these reports that are being generated and built by different users with a different point of view of how that data should have been rolled up.
Then of course they were dumped into Excel, calculations were done in Excel. Excel was our nightmare.
A rapid rollout
Having established that sorting out Williams-Sonoma's data problem was an imperative, Gurney was introduced by NetSuite to KPI Partners, a BI consultants group, and began working on a project that would create visual BI reports based on Microsoft Azure, Dell Boomi and Tableau software. The main aim was to stop working in Excel.Initially the project focused on introducing the core data that came out of NetSuite – e.g. sales and inventory – and has since moved on to introducing external data that would be considered useful for planning teams, such as promo metadata found on the websites, which the helps the business do things like make better decisions about where its margin really is.
Gurney said that that one of the main reasons that the project has succeeded – with one of the measures of success being that the US planning teams are still processing weekend data from Excel tables at midday on Monday, whereas the global teams have beautiful visual reports by 8am – is because of the rapid and agile way that Williams-Sonoma approached the project.
Instead of spending months consulting the business and consolidating on views, Gurney locked himself and his team in a room with KPI Partners for three days and made a lot of the decisions there and then. He explained that this meant that the project could be completed within two months, instead of spending three months trying to get everyone's take on things like how the data should be defined. Gurney explained:
I think that the rapid discovery session was important, because I think that's a little bit different to how a lot of IT projects are done. We locked ourselves in a room, we came up with a specific list of what the businesses needed, with the NetSuite data loaded, and we prioritised. We didn't really ask anyone what they needed, because we kind of already knew, then we went knowing we would get 90% of it right. Then we did go back and tweak it.
KPI Partner's solution architect, Ron Cruz, was also presenting alongside Gurney. He said that one of the key pieces of advice he would give is to early on define the metrics used across the business, as this will make it easier to consolidate the number of reports being built. Cruz said:
Set the single version of the truth. I always say if you go to five different retailers and ask them how they define demand, you will come back with seven answers. That's the truth. You need to get everyone to define what demand is, what is a sale, really rudimentary things.
Cruz also advised not to build more reports than are necessary. He said:
Laser focus on a small set of reports that meet all needs. We didn't go out and do everything, we
built three reports. These three include all the metrics that we had and we essentially call them the Bible. This was freeing, because if you don't do this you can get stuck in analysis paralysis.”Just focus on the ones that are absolutely necessary. When you build those core reports like we did, they can then take them off and spin up their own reports. Small number, get those right, get those rock solid.
Gurney agreed and said that he estimated that 35-40% of the reports being generated were by people going off and generating the same sort of report, but just modifying it to their own need.
Key takeaways
Finally, KPI's Cruz said that there were some valuable lessons learned from the project. For example, he agreed with Gurney that the rapid discovery sessions were incredibly valuable, even in a company the size of Williams-Sonoma. But he added that it was important to have someone senior and with authority at the business involved in the overhaul, as it makes it easier to achieve the outcomes required.
It was very agile and very fast, we didn't ask what people needed. We went all the way down as far as we could. Transaction level reporting, people like to aggregate it a little bit higher, but we found for us going down to that transaction level for each product that was sold was the most useful for us. Inventory snapshots, that was a big win for us. NetSuite doesn't really do inventory snapshots, being able to look over a period of time and ask: what was my demand? How was my inventory?
But high level engagement is absolutely necessary. If Geoff wasn't there to explain what 'today' actually means in the company, none of it would have worked. I would have had to have chased 80 different people, gather some consensus, without having that high level engagement it just doesn't work.
Also, if you are using an implementation partner, make sure they understand retail business. I've worked across a dozen different industries, but retail is different. You need to be able to run fast. Not understanding retail would have slowed things down a lot.
Cruz also added that if you are using powerful visualisation tools, such as Tableau, be prepared to find things that aren't exactly exactly pretty. To overcome any setback from this, he suggested it is best to prepare the executive team in advance and get support from the get-go. He said:
This will bring data issues to light, so set a buffer to deal with this. Especially when using a visual tool like Tableau, things that were not evident before, will become very evident. All of a sudden you will become the scapegoat. Be aware as you go through this process you are going to bring up all these ugly issues that nobody has seen or heard of, because nobody was able to visualise them before. Understand that and set that expectation up front.
Disclosure: NetSuite, SAP and Oracle are premier partners at time of writing.